ruby's kick ick

mhills16

Premium Member
i am treating my tank with this because i do not have the time or tanks to quarantine my fish, i have a longnose butterfly that has it, i have a cleaner shrimp, skunk and a cleaner wrasse who i am happy to say eats parasites off fish and eats flake and frozen foods. I was just wondering if anyone knows if it works, i just started treating the tank and have raised my temp to 83 degrees....... my butterfly has got it pretty good and is constantly trying to scratch it off.. is there any hope? i have a sailfin tang that has about 3 spots on it but i just added him two days ago so i think the kick ick will get that. any input is appreciated!
 
in my experience kick ick is extremely expensive to go thru with the recommended treatment and even with the recommended dose it dosnt work nor do any of the other non copper based reef safe meds work. The best treatment and surest treatment is quarentine with copper sulfate i have tried just about all of the reef safe meds and none have worked for me except on ocassion malichite green wich is reef safe to a sertain extent sorry if i mispelled it, and even then it will still harm some inverts like clams or zoos and some sps corals IMO the best treatment is proper nutrition and water changes weekly and most important patience and just try to kind of ignor the tank for a few days dont stick your hands in it clean the glass or do NOTHING ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING somtimes we can be the cause of stress of our fishy friends. good luck
 
I've tried kick ick (and pretty much every other "reef safe") treatment in the past. Zero success.
The only 2 methods I've had 100% success with are hyposalinity and cupramine. I prefer cupramine.
Raising the temp does not kill the parasites. It just speeds up the life cycle and gets the parasites to fall off the fish faster and into the free-swimming stage. However, if you don't kill the parasites in this stage, then they'll just reinfect your fish in even greater numbers.
 
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if i were you i would discontinue use of the medication do a good 30 or 40 gallon water change put plenty of good fresh carbon make sure your skimmer is skimming and functioning properly and do as i said leave the tank be and just feed your fish once a day do not mess with tank in the mean time just let it be if worse comes to worse i would remove your fish and begin a coppersafe treatment in quarentine tank if you do go this route then you will need to set up a quarentine tank ahead of time to allow for some nitrifing bacter to begin to colonize id estimate at least a good two weeks with a few peices of live rock this method is by far the most succesful
 
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